Statue of Irish composer one of the most obscure in New York

The bust of Irish composer Thomas Moore in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New YorkWikicommons

The statue of Irish singer/composer Thomas Moore, famous for Moore’s Melodies, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn is one of the most obscure in New York City, according to The New York Times.

(However The Times has seemingly failed to note that there is also a statue of Moore in Central park erected in 1880 and shown here.)

Moore wrote such Irish classics as “The Minstrel Boy” and “Oft in the Stilly Night” and “Last Rose of Summer” was one of the greatest musical performers and composers of his time.

Thomas Moore visited America in the early 1800s, but The Times says he is “said to have loathed most Americans, finding them crude and vulgar, and he even disliked President Thomas Jefferson, whom he met briefly in Washington."

The paper notes “It could not have helped that the president apparently mistook the diminutive Moore for a child.”

Moore may deserve recognition for the fact that he was deeply anti-slavery. As The Times notes, “On his return to Britain, he wrote "Epistles, Odes and Other Poems,” a catalog of his antipathy for all things American, particularly slavery, and his adventures with American women."

The book was deeply unpopular in the U.S., but 73 years later the St.Patrick’s Society commissioned his bust by the sculptor John G. Draddy.

The bust of Irish composer Thomas Moore in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New YorkWikicommons